C. A. R. Hoare
| birth_place = Colombo, Sri Lanka | field = Computer Scientist | work_institution = Elliott Brothers Queen's University of Belfast Oxford University Moscow State University Microsoft Research | alma_mater = Oxford University Moscow State University | doctoral_students = Stephen Brookes Cliff Jones David Naumann Bill Roscoe William Stewart | known_for = Quicksort Hoare logic CSP | prizes = ACM Turing Award }} Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (born 11 January 1934 The Times 10 January 2009, Retrieved 2010-01-09), commonly known as Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist best known for the development (in 1960, at age 26) of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language. Biography Born in Colombo (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka) to British parents, he received his Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956–1958). While he studied Russian, he also studied computer translation of human languages at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in the school of Kolmogorov. In 1960, he left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented ALGOL 60 and began developing major algorithms. |url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358561|format=PDF}} He became a Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 returned to Oxford as a Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, following the death of Christopher Strachey. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Hoare's most significant work preface to the ACM Turing Award lectureACM Turing Award citation has been in the following areas: his sorting algorithm (Quicksort), Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions between concurrent processes, structuring computer operating systems using the monitor concept, and the axiomatic specification of programming languages. Quotes The famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil", by Donald Knuth, Knuth, Donald: Structured Programming with Goto Statements. Computing Surveys 6:4 (1974), 261–301. has also been mistakenly attributed to Hoare (by Knuth himself),The Errors of Tex, in Software—Practice & Experience, Volume 19, Issue 7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685, reprinted in his book Literate Programming (p. 276) although Hoare disclaims authorship. Tony Hoare, a 2004 email Speaking at a conference in 2009, Hoare apologized for inventing the null reference: Another quote around the difficulty of creating software systems which are not overly complex states: Awards * ACM Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM. * Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981) * Fellow of the Royal Society (1982) * Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast (1987) * Knighted for services to education and computer science (2000) * Kyoto Prize for Information Science (2000) * Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2005) * Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages" (2006) * Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) (2007) Books * * * * References External links * Microsoft home page — short biography * Oral history interview with C. A. R. Hoare at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. * * The classic article on monitors — The original article on monitors Category:Microsoft employees